Archive for the 'STLD' Category

Fraudsters are at it again. There is currently a counterfeit ‘renewal’ email circulating informing domain registrants that their domains(s) is expiring for a search engine listing, domain name listing, and/or SEO listing services.

How do they do this? Fraudulent companies “mine” the WHOIS database and then use the information they gather to send counterfeit emails (in this case, renewal emails) to ‘scam’ unknowing domain registrants into renewing services that do not actually exist. They make the message so confusing that it often works because registrants are lead to believe that their domain(s) is expiring.

Our message? Be vigilant and know that your Safenames renewal emails will only ever come from us–and this is likely the same for all domain registrars. If you have any questions about this post, please contact Safenames in the UK at +44 1908 200022 (emeasales@safenames.net) or in the US at +1 703 574 5313 (nasales@safenames.net).

New GEO gTLD .MIAMI is now in TM Sunrise — this exclusive registration phase will remain open through September 18, 2015 and General Availability (GA) will open October 2, 2015. The registry will not open a formal Landrush period. Miami is a leader in finance, commerce, culture, media, entertainment, the arts, and international trade. Miami was classified as an Alpha-World City in the World Cities Study Group’s inventory and is home to largest concentration of international banks in the United States, and many large national and international companies. Registering a .MIAMI domain(s) enables companies doing business in this Florida region, or organizations serving the local communities, to secure shorter and more relevant domain names for their web site(s).

Verisign recently published an interesting report, which stated that 4 million domain names were added to the Internet during Q4 2014. This brings the total number of registered domain names to a whopping 288 million worldwide across all top-level domains (TLDs)—that’s a growth rate of 1.3% in just one quarter. What’s equally (or perhaps even more) impressive is that .com/.net registrations increased by 8.2 million in Q4 of both 2013 and 2014 and to date, account for 131.6 million of all TLD registrations (in aggregate). Of that 131.6 million, 115.6 million are .com and 15.0 million are .net. And while we’re talking about .com… we also wanted to mention that the Internet’s most recognized top-level domain turned 30 this year—Happy 30th .COM!

New gTLD .VIDEO will enter TM Sunrise tomorrow, February 24, 2015. This exclusive registration phase will remain open through March 7, 2015. The EAP will be open April 29 – May 6, 2015, at which time General Availability (GA) will launch. Registering additional domains (specifically new gTLDs) can help protect your brand(s) online within specific markets, and is one of the best way to optimize your naming strategy.

History in the making? You be the judge. Dot COM registrations exceeded 116 million active domain names for the first time in history. What’s seemingly even more impressive is that the number of registrations has increased 600K since December 31, 2014. But it is worth noting that roughly 425,000 of the 600K increase were registered in-house at the registry. So the true growth number is around 125,000, which is still significant.

In similar news, VeriSign recently published the top 10 .com and .net keywords for January. It will be interesting to see how many of the 125,000 new .com registrations (mentioned above) correlate to keywords on this list:

New gTLD .WEDDING now in TM Sunrise — this exclusive registration phase will remain open through March 30, 2015 and General Availability (GA) will open April 8, 2015 (no formal Landrush period). Registering additional domains (specifically new gTLDs) can help protect your brand(s) online within specific markets, and is one of the best way to optimize your naming strategy. For questions about this launch please contact Safenames in the UK at +44 1908 200022 (emeasales@safenames.net) or in the US at +1 703 574 5313 (nasales@safenames.net).